RIP Seamus Heaney - Soilse na gréine linn inniu

Another legend passes through the furoles of history into the abyss of immortality. 

Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist was one of the first books of modern poetry I ever studied, and the works therein have since stayed with me. Heaney was a genius of realism, of taking the landscapes of rural Ireland and glorifying them, making the Irish farm reach an apotheosis that no one else could offer. He was a great analysis of the difficult times his country faced in his lifetime. He won the Nobel Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Golden Wreath, the E.M. Foster award, and countless other honours whilst writing, touring, and translating various classics texts. Would that he not have left so soon, for poets half so meaningful are a rarity these days. His prodigious works of true art will remain whilst he travels to another realm toward his own apotheosis. 

"When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit."